What's The Best WP Plugin to Show Your Google Reviews?

For a local business, one of the best possible places to get positive reviews is Google itself. Google reviews are displayed on the Google business profile, but also on Google Maps, in the Knowledge Graph sidebars, and elsewhere.

There's just one downside: those reviews are pretty much stuck on Google.

Positive testimonials like that are really hard to come by, and they're a valuable bit of social proof that can help you win new customers. Wouldn't you embed those reviews on your site if you could? Other businesses put them on a service page, embed them on your homepage, or keep a sidebar with the top reviews visible.

I know I would. In fact, you can see exactly the way embedding positive reviews can help just by looking at my service pages.

Through the power of WordPress and the thousands of people who want exactly the same thing, there are a ton of useful plugins to do exactly what you wish could happen: embedding your Google reviews directly on your WordPress website.

I've covered the ones I think are the best for a few different reasons, and you can pick the one you like the most.

Why Not Do It Yourself?

Before getting right to the plugins, it's worth asking yourself - why not just copy and paste good reviews and call it a day? You don't really need direct embeds or live updates most of the time. Right?

Porting over reviews is going to be beneficial as a form of social proof and validation. When people are wondering whether or not they trust you enough to buy from you, it can be encouraging to see what other people have done. There's a reason that this is such a powerful psychological effect.

If you're posting reviews with no real context, it can be less trustworthy. You can tag where the reviews came from and associate the review with a URL attribution, sure. But at that point, you're essentially reinventing the wheel when a plugin can do it for you.

The main reasons to use a plugin instead of just doing it yourself, at least to me, are:

• It's faster and easier to set up. Plugins are easy to install and configure, whereas building your own custom data and formatting can be tedious and requires more maintenance.
• It can check for fresh reviews and keep the latest positive feedback available on your site. When your reviews are getting stale, people tend to notice.
• Plugins often have added features you wouldn't think to make yourself, or don't have the resources to do.

I think it's generally better to use a plugin in this instance. Pretty much all of the plugins also get around speed hit and other issues by caching the data they import, so you shouldn't have any problems there either.

The Most Fully Featured Plugin: Reviews Feed Pro

First up is Reviews Feed Pro from Smash Balloon.

This is the most robust, fully-featured, and customizable plugin I've encountered for embedding reviews on your site.

Note that I didn't say "Google reviews" there. That's because Reviews Feed Pro can pull in reviews from a wide range of sites. Google, of course, but also Tripadvisor, Facebook, TrustPilot, Yelp, and WordPress.org.

The plugin imports and caches reviews. This way, when new reviews are posted, it can pull them in quickly, but if there's ever an issue with an API or one of the review sites, you don't lose your reviews; they stay right there on your site.

It's also highly customizable. You can adjust the look and feel of the reviews to match your site, with icons to show what site the reviews came from. It's also a very easy editor, so you don't need to mess around with CSS or anything to get it looking the way you want it.

There are a bunch of useful features on the side as well.

• Highlighting reviews. You can identify specific reviews you really like, such as reviews that highlight your USP or are from particularly noteworthy people, and have them featured in your review feeds.
• It's responsive natively, which you'd think would be expected by now but is always worth making sure of, just in case.
• You can keep reviews in seperate feeds based on their source, or combine them into one shared feed, with up to 100 of the latest reviews from a given source.
• Moderation tools allow you to remove reviews from your embeds. That way, spam, irrelevant or bad reviews, fake reviews, and other reviews you wouldn't want don't have to be visible on your site.

There's a reason why literally millions of people have used this reviews plugin.

The one downside is the cost. The basic plan is $98 per year, includes a single site license, and integrates with Yelp and Google reviews. If that's all you need, it has all of the other features, so you're good to go. The middle-tier plan is $198 per year for five site licenses and adds Facebook and TrustPilot reviews to the mix. The top-tier plan adds on TripAdvisor and WordPress.org reviews, bumps up to checking for new reviews twice a day instead of just once, and gives ten site licenses, but costs $298 annually.

Smash Balloon has a bunch of other plugins as well, including feed embeds from social networks like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, as well as a social wall and a feed analytics app. All of this and all of their future products, for unlimited sites, run you $598 per year.

If all you want to do is embed Google reviews, the cheapest plan is good enough, and a bit over $8 a month isn't too bad for it. Still, it's not a free plugin, and that's a deal-breaker for some people.

They do have a free version, but it's very limited. It can pull in Google reviews, but it doesn't give you the customization options of the paid plans, and it's limited in most of its other features.

The Best Customizable Free Plugin: Widgets for Google Reviews

If free is the right speed for you, Widgets for Google Reviews by Trustindex is a great option.

It's lightweight and streamlined, but that does come at the cost of added features. It only does Google Reviews (which is fine, since that's what we're after today), but that does leave off potential reviews from other sites. It's also only somewhat customizable; they give you 40-something layouts and 25+ styles, so you can probably find something that works, but if you want anything outside of those templates, you have to tinker yourself.

You do still get filters to hide reviews you don't want embedded on your site, which is always handy if you're being review-bombed and Google hasn't removed the fakes yet. You can also display replies to the reviews, if you want to show additions or clarifications you add to the reviews you get on Google.

One nice feature is the option to anonymize the name attached to the review. Generally, if you're going to use a review someone leaves for you, you don't need to do that. But some people prefer not to have their name attached to something they can't control (they can always delete the review, but they can't remove it from your site), so it can feel like a privacy violation.

Trustindex has a paid version with a ton of added features, but a lot of them aren't really "killer features" to me, so I don't think it's quite as easy to recommend as Smash Balloon. For example, you can generate image reviews with a quote over a picture, or embed reviews in an email signature. Nice, but not something I'd want to pay for.

The one reason you might consider paying for it is that they have a whopping 137 different pages they can pull reviews from, so if you've been searching for a way to import reviews from some niche site somewhere, chances are they can do it.

The Best Social Media Review Plugin: WP Review Slider Pro

WP Review Slider Pro is a paid plugin, but it's only $2.50 per month, so it's barely more than free. It has higher-priced plans for multi-site licenses, but they're all fully featured and identical.

WP Review Slider Pro has a ton of features I find very useful, but it does tend to require a little more digging and customization than some of the other options on this list.

• You can deeply customize the templates for the reviews, and it supports custom CSS. That's very handy if you like having granular control and not being limited to specific templates.
• It has a verified toggle. Verifying that reviews are legitimate is required in some areas, like the UK, but not everywhere, so you can enable and disable it as necessary.
• It can import and embed media from reviews as well as text. This can be very handy for certain kinds of reviews, especially product and location reviews.
• You can truncate lengthy reviews with a "read more" or keep them with a scroll bar, whatever works best for your layout.
• The review embeds can have Schema attached, so they can even be part of Google's rich snippets.

One feature I don't much care for, but some people like, is the AI review summary. Amazon has been doing this a lot; a summary of the reviews all accumulated to convey a sort of ur-review sentiment. I never find those super useful (I want more specific feedback), but if you like it, it's there.

Two other features really make this plugin stand out to me.

The first is the front-end submission form. This is one of those exit intent style pop-ups that solicits reviews from people. You can put this in specific places like your checkout page, a support page, and elsewhere, to gather more positive reviews and catch negative reviews before they end up on a third-party site.

The second is WP Review Slider Embed. Since WP Review Slider is already aggregating your reviews, they make those available with embed code to put into other sites, including on landing pages, on non-WP sites, and in apps. It does cost a bit extra on top of the base price of the plugin, but even with both together, it's still cheap.

The Best Free No-Frills Plugin: Reviews and Rating – Google Reviews

To round things out is Reviews and Rating – Google Reviews. This is your completely free, no-frills, basic plugin for embedding Google Reviews. It pulls reviews directly from Google using a Google API key.

The basics are all there.

• Customization and display options, though they aren't the most robust of the plugins available.
• Unconstrained filtering of reviews to pick and choose which ones to show on your site.
• Structured Data and Schema supported.
• Shortcode support to embed reviews within pages throughout WordPress easily.

Best of all, this isn't freemium or "pay more to get more" like the other plugins out there. It's 100% free.

Sure, you lose some features for that. It's solely Google reviews, for one thing. Customization is a little limited. But, if all you want to do is pull Google reviews from Google Business Profile or Places, and that's it? You're good to go.

The one downside to this plugin is that you have to jump through some hoops to get a Google API key to access reviews, rather than just using a simple setup, the way other plugins do. In really rare instances, you can even accidentally go over the free API quota and end up getting billed for usage, so make sure you know what you're doing before you set it loose.

That's a comparatively minor downside, though, and when you're getting the features for free, it's probably something you're used to dealing with. I know I'm no stranger to the hoops when I'm messing around with growth hack strategies and the like.

Your Suggestions

I've only covered a few plugins here, and I know there are more out there. So, my question to you is this: do you have a favorite that does the job better than the ones I've listed? Let me know which one and why.

For example, I know that plugins like WP Business Reviews are also options, but I find that to be very comparable to Smash Balloon, without much to make it stand apart, except for a slightly different selection of sites it can pull reviews from. I don't know that I'd call it "better"... just a bit different.

I'm interested in seeing what you went with, so let me know in the comments! I'd love to get a conversation started on this subject, especially since we use plugins like this on our client's websites all the time. If there's a better plugin, I want to know about it!